Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit

12. Rivers

12

RIVERS

I woke up on the couch in my suite, and that seemed...

Well, wrong.

I never slept on the couch. This one was too short for me, to start with, and insanely uncomfortable. It had one of those raised designs, too, and when I moved, I felt like the pattern had somehow imprinted itself into the skin of my arm.

What the hell was I doing on the couch in my suite, letting it tattoo me with flowers and whatever else it sported?

I opened my eyes and stared blearily across the room at the bed, wondering how I’d ended up here and not there. This didn’t seem right. The bed was only like five steps away. Even if I’d been drunk, I would have taken those five steps for the sake of a comfortable pillow and mattress. Not to mention the blanket. Why would I have slept here instead of?—

Someone rolled over in the bed, groaning, and I sat straight up and stared. Who the hell was in my bed? And why? I stood up and walked in that direction, trying desperately to remember, and saw...

Oh God.

A flash of red hair. A nose covered in freckles. Eyes that were closed right now but that would be bright green when they opened up.

Fuck.

I tried to remember what we’d done last night—tried to remember if there had been alcohol involved—but all I got was the vision of us in the restaurant. I’d gone in because I couldn’t sleep and wanted some company, and when I went down into the lobby to see if anyone from the band was hanging out, the only light had been coming from the café. I’d thought I’d get some coffee and maybe ice cream or pie. Take my mind down a notch or two by feeding it. Maybe force the server to listen to me ramble. But when I walked in, I’d found Lila playing her guitar with her eyes closed, the lone light in the place shining on her like she’d just descended from Heaven. She’d been as beautiful as an angel in that moment, and I’d drifted toward her without meaning to.

Then I’d started eating her pie and found the chef to get a slice of my own. I’d thought that she might be willing to let me sit with her, for just a bit. Just long enough for my brain to get quiet again and sleep to reach for me. And from there…

We’d ended up sitting there for most of the night, talking. Playing that stupid question and answer game and talking about lyrics in between. She was a master lyricist, evidently, but had lost her muse, and I’d told her that when that happened, I switched over to poetry. Words that didn’t need to fit into a melody and had more freedom. It always got the creative juices flowing again, and lyrics were just poetry in the end, weren’t they? We’d gone through nearly an entire pie together, talking and laughing, and by the time we came upstairs, it had been early morning rather than late night.

She hadn’t been able to get into her room. She hadn’t had a key and Anna had been asleep.

And though the logical answer would have been to go down to reception and get another key for the room, I’d told her that reception had been closed—it had, for the record—and that she could have my bed. I’d take the couch.

There hadn’t been anything more to it than that. Sure, it had been a little lie. Reception had been dark but there was always someone on duty somewhere, and we could have found them if we’d wanted to.

Neither of us had mentioned it. Instead, she’d agreed to the offer of my bed and I’d taken her into my room, laid down on the couch, and pretended not to listen while she settled her guitar for the night and climbed into a bed I knew smelled like me. I stayed quiet while she rustled around, looking for a comfortable position, and I definitely hadn’t thought about her laying in sheets I’d already had against my own skin. She’d fallen asleep quickly, and though I’d stayed awake for what felt like hours, listening to her breathe, I’d eventually drifted off, feeling more peaceful than I could remember feeling in... ever. There’s something about sleeping in the same space as someone else that had always made me feel safer. More secure. Like I’d have a friend if something happened.

Stupid, I know. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

And now that someone was still in my bed, her face relaxed and her skin practically glowing in the early morning sunlight. God, she was beautiful. And sweet and kind and possibly the most empathetic person I’d ever met.

If I was shadows and darkness, she was dust motes dancing in sunbeams.

At that moment, Anna’s eyes came open and she stared at me, horrified. I watched her face as she searched her own memories, looking for the reason she was here, and saw the relief when she remembered that we hadn’t done anything but talk and sleep.

Then her eyes went to the clock on the bedside table and opened up even further. She launched herself out of bed like she had a catapult hidden in there and started searching for her shoes.

“What are you doing?” I asked, shocked.

She turned and pointed at the clock. “Rivers, it’s 11 in the morning! We overslept!”

I looked at the clock, still confused. “Overslept for what?”

She turned on me, looking like she couldn’t believe how stupid I was. “The tour, Rivers! The schedule had everyone leaving this morning at 10. Which means we’re an hour late for getting our asses on the road!”

She finally found her shoes, shoved her feet into them, grabbed her guitar, and literally ran out of the room, shouting instructions back at me for calling Taylor and Olivia and letting them know that we were up and getting ready.

* * *

Moments later she was back at my door, her eyes enormous and her fair skin mottled with red.

“Anna’s not in our room,” she said, her voice shaky.

“What?” I asked. “Is she downstairs?”

“No one’s downstairs. No one’s here. The entire hotel is, like, empty. I went and asked the receptionist, and she said they left. An hour ago.”

Wait. Left? Like… just gone? That didn’t make sense. They’d known what room I was in. They’d known that I was in there—or they would have if they’d called or bothered to knock. It wasn’t like I’d just up and disappeared in the middle of the night or something. And even if I had, there was this thing called a cell phone. I never went anywhere without mine, and I knew for a fact that both Matt and Noah had me on speed dial.

I was also the lead singer of one of the bands on tour.

Why would they have left without me?

And a better question: Why would Anna have left without Lila? The girls were basically inseparable, and from what I’d seen, Anna acted like protecting Lila was her personal mission in life. I couldn’t imagine a world in which she’d just up and leave the girl behind, in a hotel in a strange city.

I grabbed Lila’s hand and hauled her toward the stairs, my mind turning through the information so quickly it was going to make me sick. The tour had a specific schedule, yes, but that schedule was at least kind of flexible. Especially when it came to the timing for moving on from a hotel. I knew the next city and it wasn’t that far away. Maybe a two-hour drive? Three if you were going slow. And we were scheduled to get into the next city hours before the show. The tour manager had wanted to give us time to see the sights before we had to be onstage.

Why were they in such a hurry that they’d left us here? Just because we overslept? That didn’t check out.

We got down the stairs and to the reception desk in no time flat and I paused, trying to bring my charm to the forefront. I wanted to know what was going on, and yelling at the poor kid behind the desk wasn’t going to help me do that.

“Excuse me,” I asked, striving for a reasonable tone of voice.

The kid turned to me and his eyes widened. “Rivers Shine.”

I gave him a quick grin. “That’s right. Lila here says she talked to you and you told her everyone has already left. Is that true? The whole tour has already departed?”

“Th-That’s right, sir,” he stuttered.

“I’m not a sir,” I said quickly. “That word is for old men with pipes, and that’s not you or me. Did anyone happen to say why they left without waking me up first? Or what they thought I should do about it? Did they leave directions or something?”

Not that I needed directions on how to get to the next city. I knew where we were going. But I’d never been left alone while on tour before. I didn’t exactly know the rules for this sort of thing.

His face, which had been pale up to this point, suddenly broke out into a smile. “They didn’t say anything about it, no. But they did leave you a note.”

A note. They left me a note ?

This was all starting to feel like some colossal joke. Everyone on tour—including my best friends and band mates—had left me behind and gone to the next town without me. Anna had left without Lila. And they’d done nothing more than leave us a note?

“Can I have it?” I asked, knowing that my voice now sounded tense and unhappy.

He nodded and slid an envelope across to me, looking like this was all really entertaining.

It wasn’t.

It got even less entertaining when I read the note.

It didn’t say much. Just a couple of lines from Taylor about how they’d noticed that Lila and I hadn’t been getting to spend much quality time together and that they’d decided to remedy the situation. Do us both the favor of leaving us alone and giving us time to really get to know one another.

They’d left us here together on purpose.

So that we’d have to find our own way to the next town.